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The case discusses Nike's sustainability and labor practices from 1998 to 2013, focusing on the successful steps Nike took up and down the supply chain and in its headquarters to make its products and processes more environmentally friendly, and the challenges and complexities it was still facing in its efforts to improve labor conditions.

Nike's labor practices were the subject of high profile public protests in the 1990s, and CEO Mark Parker said the company still had a lot of work to do in that area. The case also details how making sustainability a key part of the design process led Nike to develop more innovative and high-performing products, such as a breakthrough running shoe called the Flyknit, which was widely worn at the 2012 Olympics. Following protests in the late 1990s over unsafe working conditions, low wage rates, excessive overtime, restrictions on employee organizing, and negative environmental impacts, Nike began shifting from a reactive to a proactive mode. During the 15 years covered in this case, Nike made significant changes in its sustainability practices, including moving its Corporate Responsibility team much further upstream in the organization, where it could have a greater impact on decisions by providing input early in the process. The company also developed multiple indexes that measured its sustainability practices and those of its independent contract manufacturers. The indexes had metrics for measuring the relevant impacts of product waste, water, chemistry, labor, and energy. Nike's critics said many labor issues had not been resolved, but Nike made progress in that area through collaboration with governments, NGOs and labor unions, and through management compliance trainings. If a contract factory did not score high enough on the company's sustainability and labor ratings scales, Nike would impose sanctions on the factory or even drop it from the supply chain. These actions took Nike off the top of most activists' target lists.

learning objective:

The learning objective of the case is for students to understand how a large, high-profile global company is navigating the complexities of becoming more sustainable and improving labor practices.

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Mukesh Ambani, the CEO of India's largest business house, Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), was contemplating a major decision that could significantly affect the future of his company as well as the telecommunications landscape in India. By 2002, GSM (Global System for Mobile) cellular roaming services, based on TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) technology, had become the de facto standard in India. Seeking to find an alternative to GSM, Ambani's telecom team had developed an innovative solution for providing inexpensive roaming cellular services to customers on a nationwide basis using CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology. The required infrastructure for CDMA, which was significantly less costly than that of GSM, was already in place. As an early mover with a competitively priced CDMA offering, Ambani was confident he could capture a large percentage of the market. Reliance had permission from the Indian government to provide local CDMA coverage, yet there was nothing in the law that explicitly prohibited the company from rolling out these services on a more widespread basis to subscribers across the country.

learning objective:

To expose students to the dynamic, competitive, and complex Indian telecom market and enable them to explore the importance of non-market forces in performing tradeoff analysis.

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For nearly 50 years, the Korean peninsula has been separated by a band, 2.5 miles wide, which has divided the land into north and south. Heavily armed on both sides, the Demilitarized Zone itself has become an environmental haven. Since the end of the Korean War, this land has been virtually untouched by humans. Surrounded by tanks and electrified fences, cranes, egrets, and bears roam free. A three-hour drive to the south is Seoul, one of Asia's most important cities. With 20 million residents, Seoul is the home of South Korea's government, largest businesses, and thought leaders. There, a small, grass-roots group of affluent, well-connected, self-described "housewives" struggle with some of the key issues of South Korea's future. Their group is called Mirae, meaning "future" in Korean. They work to prepare for what almost all South Koreans see as the inevitable reunification of north and south. As they raise and use funds, their challenges are myriad: how best to create a nonprofit in a society that has traditionally thought of charity as an intrafamily issue, whether they should limit their giving to people in their own country, and how to support the North Korean people while not supporting the oppressive North Korean government.

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In 1992, the Reichs started an innovative public school in a low-income area of New York City to provide quality education to urban children that the public school system was not serving properly. They had founded the Beginning with Children Foundation (BWCF) in 1989 as a public foundation to support the school. Alternative public schools did not exist when the Reichs were planning the educational and business model for their school. This case provides the background for the challenges the foundation faced in its first eight years and then opens for discussion what the new strategic direction might be for the foundation after charter legislation passed in 1998 and the Reichs decided to convert the school to an independent charter. The foundation considered: 1) becoming an advocacy organization for charter schools and public school reform, 2) creating new charter schools by replicating the model, 3) converting to a national policy think tank to analyze accumulated data and publish studies, 4) becoming an educational consulting firm to provide strategic management and policy services to "client" schools, and 5) applying their educational model to turn around troubled schools.

learning objective:

To assess the BWCF's approach, strengths, and weaknesses and to discuss each of the strategic options and the ways in which BWCF's comparative advantage or strength lends itself to each approach.

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